Password protection is essential part of the security policy and you should consider disabling it as the uttermost measure. The possible scenario includes home machine with no domain identification used only at home by family members. Do not disable the password request on your laptop under any circumstances, you may probably want to configure your laptop not to re-request your password on wake-up, but it is essential for keeping your private data secured against undesired access in case of laptop being lost or stolen.

So, in order to disable logon password request you have to do the following:

  1. Download the Autologon utility from sysinternals collection from here:
    http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/sysinternals/bb963905.aspx
  2. Start the tool with elevated privileges:
  3. Confirm the start with elevated privileges (using safe desktop if you have UAC activated on Vista/Win7).
  4. Accept the license agreement.
  5. Enter your computer name for logon as a local user or domain name for domain logon.
    Then enter your username (local or domain) and password (shown as asterisks).
  6. Click "Enable" to enable autologon.

From now on your system will logon automatically.

In order to disable autologon in the future you have to either change the password of your account or re-start the tool and click "Disable". A message window will prompt the new status of autologon (enabled or disabled).

This solution was tested on Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate, reportedly it also works for Windows 2000.